All I can think about is me

Last night, after dinner
I couldn’t resist
pushing the bright red button
on the checkout counter, repeatedly

Every two pumps
a new javelin shot up
emerged, toaster-popping
from someplace under-stage, unseen

“My, what a nifty dispenser!”
“and mints, as well, it seems”
At the moment, I didn’t have a need
Nothing
in my teeth, to dislodge or free
It feels gross when you say it that way
the mundane, unsheathed so explicitly
But, it had been a while
since my last try, aiming at something

So, I smiled
making space, between
my lower front teeth
brushing past new patrons, as I leave
multi-tasked
with opening doors and lifting knees

I hear a snap, low crack
tree branch and wing-beat
flutter, loud
in forest-clearing

A piece
splintered
wedged in me
dead center, right where my dentist told me
a gap was forming, under pressure
tiny book-ends squeeze

Just then, I saw the light
blinding, freeze
my limbs, sprawl out
“why does it always happen to me?!”
Abducted, in plain sight
but all I can seem to think
is how to get
this goddamn toothpick
out of my teeth

Back of the Page

I’ve felt heavy. For a while now, really. There’s always something very Serious going on that I feel compelled to engage with. There’s a Time and a Place For That, which seems to default to Always Now and Always On The Internet, so this week, I decided to bring things closer to home, with proximity. After a nice Hot Pot dinner with my family back in March, I had a random idea:

What if you were abducted by aliens at the exact moment a toothpick was lodged in your teeth?

What if something so once-in-a-lifetime and shocking as an alien abduction happened to you while you were experiencing one of the world’s most mundane and very recoverable annoyances? How would we reconcile the Big Story (oh shit!) with the little story (oh shit…), and what role does proximity have in our capacity to make sense of anything?

It’s a question that just popped in my head as I was grappling with a newly-splintered piece of wood lodged between my teeth (sorry people that don’t like talking about mouths, next week will have no mention of teeth stuff in any way, shape, or form, I promise).

You can take this any way, really: a rock in a shoe when you need to be running from something dangerous. To me, it humanizes us to think about the mundane. We’re real people experiencing things, not actors or characters in an action or fantasy story.

As a kid, I was constantly wondering: how come no one ever goes to the bathroom in stories? Lord of the Rings would have a lot of pit stops, and probably a full spin-off of road-trip related awkwardness. But we come for the Adventure - we want to escape the mundane, and try to de-humanize the characters in order to simplify things.

This week I wanted to sit with more of that day-to-day present-moment feeling, and say, if it were me being abducted, I’d probably be sitting on whatever weird abduction table, tonguing the wood-splinter, maybe the last organic connection to Earth that I have, wondering “how the hell am I going to get this thing dislodged without another toothpick?” A thought Douglas Adams may have had, somewhere along the line…maybe.

Here’s to feeling all the stories.

Happy traveling 🛸